From The Mailbag: BP2002, Revenue Sharing, and Jack Morris

BASEBALL PROSPECTUS 2002

When will I recieve my copy of Baseball Prospectus 2002?

–Many People

Baseball Prospectus 2002 will arrive in our publisher’s warehouse
on Tuesday, February 5. From there, it will be sent to resellers
and on to you. To aid in comparison, we’re four days behind the
timetable for last year’s book, so if you ordered that online,
you can expect to get it about four days later than you did last
year.

Marvin Miller understood that by putting limits on free agency,
the supply would be kept low, thus driving up the price.

If the owners want to keep down labor costs without taking a PR hit, why
don’t they propose free agency for all players at the end of every
contract?

Premier free agents would get top dollar, while marginal talents would
have to scramble for jobs. The players union would seem greedy if
they opposed the idea.

–Ted Baker

Setting aside the issue of whether Miller really believes (-ed)
this, the problems this type of structure creates are so
wide-ranging as to make it unworkable. The entire MLB/MinLB
relationship would have to be rebuilt; year-to-year planning
would become impossible; the whining about how players
moved too much would rise to frightening levels…

If the problem truly is the Yankees, couldn’t something be done to erode
their considerable local revenue? Perhaps introducing one or two more teams
to the New York area? Brooklyn Expos anyone?

It seems to me that introducing an additional team to the NY area would
be better for baseball as a whole than introducing a team to the Northern
Virginia area. Doing so would, hopefully, erode some of of the Yankees’
market share, yet give a team more potential revenues (1/3 of the New York
market, in the long run) than 1/2 of Northern Virginia/Baltimore area.

Both would bring litigation, but what are your opinions on what would be
best for the game?

–Joshua Hall

I’ve come out in favor of Northern New Jersey expansion
in the past, but the more I think about it, there are at
least two big problems:

I think part of the reason for Jack Morris’s "legend" is just that he’s
about the best that we’ve got for the 1980s, other than Roger Clemens.
For a defensive era, that decade is mightly short on great pitchers.

And the funny thing is, that no matter how baseball writers try to beatify
the guy, Morris’s legend just never took hold among fans. The writers just
can’t seem to grasp that a decade might only produce one real whiz-bang
Hall-of-Fame starting pitcher. They figure that there HAS to be more, and
that we just haven’t found them yet. Maybe David Cone. Maybe Dennis
Martinez, if we squint hard enough.

The real question for me is next year, does Eddie Murray get in on his first
try? Or are the current crop of guys like McGwire, Bagwell, Thomas, etc.
so far above him that he now looks marginal? Sure, at the time he was
great, but now he looks kind of weak in comparison…. Although I dare say it’s
interesting to see how Thomas turns out in the end.

–CR

You touched on a couple of things that really interested me while I
was writing this article. One is our fascination with decades, and
how that benefits Morris. As you say, perhaps the most prevalent of
the pro-Morris arguments is that he was the "pitcher of the 1980’s",
and that’s mostly just an accident of timing. Morris just happened to
concentrate most of his good seasons in years whose third digit was
"8", and somehow some significance has gotten attached to that fluky
fact. Comparable pitchers, say Bret Saberhagen and Frank Viola, who
spread their good seasons more evenly between the ’80s and the ’90s,
won’t get that same advantage.

Thanks for speaking out about this fallacy that Gammons, Stark, and Morgan
have been spreading for years. I also get sick of hearing those same tired
arguments about the World Series. Using the same reasoning, I could start
a similar campaign to get other October heroes in the hall. Pepper Martin,
Don Larsen, Chuck Essegian, the list is endless.

The bottom line is that Morris had one great game that everyone has
canonized and somehow made emblematic of his entire career. I’ve even been an ardent
defender of Lonnie Smith’s baserunning over the years, but it still doesn’t
help Morris’ cause. Let’s not forget that Lonnie hit the grand slam that slew
this mythical hero in Game 5 the very next year.

–Shane Demmitt

It’s funny how sportswriters will use an argument for a particular
player that they clearly wouldn’t want applied to all players, e.g.,
your point about World Series heroes. My favorite recent one is
in the Bill Simmons column,
where he’s making a case against Bert
Blyleven: "I can’t remember coming home from school and having my
father say to me, ‘Let’s go to Fenway and scalp tickets — Bert
Blyleven’s in town!’ He’s out."

I love your work, and as a Mets fan, understand why a sabermetrics
guy would not be a big fan of the organization. But would you please explain
why you single them out for abuse?

–GM

I’m not anti-Mets. Actually, (as the next TA will reveal) I’m impressed with
the swag from the Burnitz deal. As the final shoe dropping on a busy winter,
it leads to an interesting set of acquisitions.
And
as I stated in the last TA, I like the upside of the risk involved in
signing Pedro Astacio.

I agree with your assessment of Barry Bonds.
He’s a stinker, has always
been a stinker, and will always be a stinker; pretty much as his father was.
It’s an old story,no longer news, and I’m tired of hearing about it. We
should, however, appreciate him for what he also is: argueably the best
player of our era and maybe of all time. Still, I question the wisdom of
signing a 38-year-old to a five-year contract for so much money. Do you
agree?

–EK

I wouldn’t venture the opinion that Barry Bonds is a bad or a good guy,
because I’m not in a position to know, and frankly, I don’t care. My
relationship with Barry Bonds is that I’m a baseball
fan/enthusiast/writer/analyst/whatever, and he’s the best player of his
generation, and one of the greatest of all time. What I get is entertainment
watching the man play, and what he gets is the enjoyment of playing and a
nice compensation package.

Now that the A’s have acquired Carlos Pena,
does it still make sense to go
after Jack Cust? Cust’s power and patience combination is, like Pena’s, exciting,
although he would likely be a career DH due to his poor fielding and Pena’s
presence at first base. If it does make sense to go after Cust, who do the
A’s have that Colorado would be interested in and the A’s can afford to
lose?

Also,
I recently read an article on LatinoBaseball.com
quoting Miguel Tejada as saying his agent and the A’s are in conversations
on a contract extension to ensure he will be with the A’s for the next 10 years,
with a potential value over $100 million. Do you think the next evolution in
the Beane approach is too start locking in select under-30 talent who are
willing to trade top market dollar for consistency and security?

–JS

Does it still make sense to go after Jack Cust? In a word, yes. If the
Rockies were serious about asking for Adam Piatt for Cust, I’d take Cust in
a heartbeat. However, now that the Rockies have acquired Todd Zeile, I
suspect that line of negotiations is off of the table.

What need is there to slam Bill James in such venomous fashion
for writing "pass" about a single player in a book where he writes voluminous
comments on hundreds of players? As a fan of Jeff Bagwell, I wish James
would’ve expounded upon him. I didn’t feel particularly cheated of my $31.50
(the book is much cheaper on Amazon), however, that he didn’t take the time
to explain himself. Nor did I assume that "pass" was the extent of his
reasoning on ranking Bagwell where he did. There are ample things to
critique in any book of more than 1,000 pages. In particular I found a lot
of the arbitrary adjustments in the Win Shares method dubious. Maybe there’s
just some personal animosity here that the public isn’t aware of, in which
case it’s questionable why such dripping sarcasm should be published for the
unknowing world to see. I’ll be sure to scrutinize every player comment in
my Baseball Prospectus to make sure it’s worth my $15.36 (again,
Amazon).

–Jeffrey Burk

I wasn’t aware that I was being "venomous," and I harbor no personal
animosity against the best sabermetrically-inclined writer on the face of
the planet. However, I could just as easily refer you to the equally
engrossing Don Mattingly comment, or the comments that are nothing more than
newspaper or magazine quotations. I expected a little more Bill James in my
Bill James, that’s all, in the same that all of us who have been spoiled by
enjoying James from 15 or 20 years ago are exactly that, spoiled.